The indictment, take 2

Today’s New York Sun editorial advocates a presidential pardon for Lewis Libby. This editorial does not get everything right, but on some points it swats the ball out of the park. Here are a few ot them in the space of one paragraph:

If Ms. Plame didn’t want her identity out, she shouldn’t have gotten her husband a secret mission and then allowed him to wage a public campaign against the president’s foreign policy. The leading prevaricator in this case is Mr. Wilson himself. He has accused Mr. Bush of falsely leading America to war. Mr. Bush had claimed “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Mr. Wilson drank tea in Niger for a week and said that Mr. Bush’s claim was not true. But even after Mr. Wilson’s objection, the July 2004 report by the British government’s Butler Commission found that Mr. Bush’s comment was “well-founded.” In a July 2004 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senators Roberts, Hatch, and Bond said of Mr. Wilson, “The former Ambassador, either by design or through ignorance, gave the American people and, for that matter, the world a version of events that was inaccurate, unsubstantiated, and misleading.”

The question pregnant in this paragraph seems to me whether there is a serious journalist among the mainstream media who thinks the story in the Libby case might be the CIA’s efforts to defeat the president. Isn’t that the big story?